Belmont couple, Lions Club donate wheelchairs to Haitian children

On Jan. 12, life got even more difficult for three dozen disabled children and young adults at the Wings of Hope School outside of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.

Christian Schiavone/cschiavo@cnc.com

On Jan. 12, life got even more difficult for three dozen disabled children and young adults at the Wings of Hope School outside of the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince.

The devastating earthquake that rocked the country cracked their school building in half, making it uninhabitable. None of the students or staff members were killed in the quake, but it robbed the students — about half of whom use wheelchairs — of access to the only wheelchair accessible building in the country.

Earlier this month, Ele Coffin and a group of her colleagues at the Cotting School in Lexington traveled to the school’s new location in two rented houses to bring supplies and two badly needed additional wheelchairs.

“They could probably use 12 more,” said Coffin, a middle school teacher at Cotting. “What we did was just a drop in the bucket.”

Coffin and her husband Doug Ertelt donated one of the two collapsible wheelchairs and the Belmont Lions Club, of which Ertelt is a member, donated the other.

Lions Club President Robert Barrett said the other members were happy to help out when Ertelt suggested the idea of donating a wheelchair.

“He brought it up and we thought it was a good idea, so we did it,” said Barrett. “It’s a worthy cause and that’s what we do — give to worthy causes.”

Coffin said the Cotting School formed an affiliation with Wings of Hope six years ago because the two schools serve students with similar needs. Twice a year, a group of staff members from Cotting visit the Haitian school, which is located in the mountains about an hour’s drive from Port-au-Prince.

A trip planned for last February had to be cancelled because of the conditions following the earthquake, Coffin said.

After the earthquake, the students spent two weeks living in a pair of rooms before the school was able to rent the nearby homes. The new location is smaller than the old school and does not have running water. The only source of electricity is a finicky generator.

The school doesn’t have enough wheelchairs to go around and the students have to share so they can be brought up and down stairs at the school’s new location or to doctor’s appointments. Some of the wheelchairs they do have are largely held together with duct tape, Coffin said.

Still, Coffin said the students and staff, some of whom live at the school, are happy to have a place to live when so many of their fellow Haitians are still living in makeshift tent cities six months after the massive earthquake.

“They consider themselves blessed to have a roof over their heads,” she said.

Wings of Hope is the only school or orphanage dedicated to serving students with special needs in Haiti and it receives no funding from the Haitian government, according to Coffin. Many of the students are abandoned by their families at hospitals or turned over to Doctors Without Borders because their families cannot care for them.

Coffin said the students met the group with big smiles and were happy to see the Cotting staff members, they’ve come to know.

“Even though the school wasn’t the same, they’re lucky,” said Coffin. “There are thousands and thousands of people living in tents. It’s a bad situation.”